The nonsense math effect

This week, the Freakonomics blog covered research by Stockholm University’s Kimmo Eriksson, which found that including a mathematical equation in the abstract of a research paper made scholars from different fields judge the research to be ‘of higher quality’, even though the equation is unrelated to the work and also complete nonsense. The study included 200 participants, although the amount by which the equation increased the perceived ‘quality’ of research varied between disciplines, and in fact caused a slight decrease for people working in mathematics or science subjects.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been obsessively playing the game Twenty on my phone. Then I decided to make my own game in a similar vein. The fact that my wife has consistently been ahead of my high scores has nothing to do with it.